The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [20]
Rules then puts the finishing touches on the bill’s language and sends it to the floor the very next morning. The version that leaves the Rules Committee is now called not a bill, but a rule. The Rules Committee is supposed to give House members three days to read the rule before it goes to a vote, but the three-day period can be waived in case of emergency. The “emergency” has been in place for five consecutive years now; virtually every bill that has passed through the House in the Bush era has been voted on just hours after emerging from the hairy womb of the Rules Committee.
After the House passes the rule, which of course no one voting on it has read, the world then waits for the Senate to pass its own hideous version of the legislation. But alas, the bill cannot be sent to the president until the differences between the House and Senate versions—consisting generally of differing sets of campaign donor hand-jobs hidden in the two bills—can be ironed out. This ironing out is done in the conference committee.
The mechanism of conference committee is a special voodoo all unto itself, a monstrously complex bureaucratic maze whose diabolical scheme is known to a select few congressional practitioners. But for the moment, only two facts are important.
The first is that the bill can again be completely rewritten here, rewritten from top to bottom, rewritten even so that it has a completely opposite meaning from the bills that passed the two houses—in a word, rewritten in such fashion as to render the whole process up till now meaningless.
The second is that a majority vote of conference committee members, called “conferees,” is not even required for passage. Again, the conference committee chairs are the key players here. Whatever the top dogs from the House and Senate want generally occurs. They redo the bill according to whatever swinish commercial dynamic happens to govern this back-room deal (for the conference hearings are almost always conducted out of the public eye), then send the final version to a vote, again giving the members just a few hours’ notice before they make an essentially blind decision on the by-now completely revised legislation.
Somewhere along the line, campaign donors apparently figured out that by a careful stewarding of their contributions, they could—instead of spending gargantuan sums to buy the wide majority of House and Senate members necessary for an open vote on the floor—instead target those members who could simply rewrite the important parts of the bill in secret. God knows when this revelation first hit home, but when they were caught for the first time, one of the key players was none other than Joe Barton.
This landmark nonmoment in congressional history (for although it should have been a huge story, it fizzled to nothing and all the guilty got away with everything, as usual) came in the spring/summer of 2003.
It was the misfortune of Tom DeLay, Joe Barton, Billy Tauzin, and other then-influential House members that a Kansas-based energy company called Westar came under the scrutiny of shareholders for a series of allegedly corrupt practices by its corporate leadership. As part of its internal investigation, the company posted a slew of internal communications on its Web site. A number of those outlined a scheme in which the company leaders, in a series of e-mails traded back and forth, worked out contribution levels for various Republican congressmen in exchange for “a seat at the table” in an upcoming energy bill.
Essentially, Westar paid $56,000 to get an item inserted in the energy bill exempting their company—and their company alone—from a section of the Public Utility Holding Company Act, also known as PUHCA. The only purpose of the amendment was to make possible a split of the company in such a way that Westar CEO David Wittig would get a $15 million payout. These are the kinds of services congressmen perform in reality,